Histories of debt.
| Author | Stafford, James |
| Position | Review essay |
Debt: The First 5000 Years
David Graeber
MELVILLE HOUSE, 2011
The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society From Rousseau to Fichte
Isaac Nakhimovsky
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2011
Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution
Michael Sonenscher
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2007
The ubiquity of debt
Debt is everywhere in our political discourse; the single social relation that links the multiple, intersecting crises of the world economy, and one which imposes the most crippling restrictions on the political agendas of social democrats (Sen, 2011). Three recent works, each (in their way) representative of some lively streams in contemporary academic and political practice, might help us to understand what's really at stake in our current condition, by building discussions of debt and money in to meditations on history and political theory.
Michael Sonenscher and Isaac Nakhimovsky are both involved in an ongoing effort to reappraise the eighteenth century discipline of political economy and its relationships with moral philosophy and constitutional theory, a field that has emerged in coincidence with a revival of political interest in Adam Smith and the retreat of classical Marxism from the academy (for example: Hont and Ignatieff, 1983; Rothschild, 1998; Hont, 2005; Robertson, 2005; Phillipson, 2010; Reinert, 2011). The intellectual history of debt is revealed to be indispensible to the understanding of the representative governments that we now take to be distinctively 'modern'.
The radical anthropologist and alterglobalisation activist David Graeber is certainly in agreement with the claim that the analytical innovations of the eighteenth century 'still ought to command our attention' (Hont, 2005). As critics have noted (Begg, 2012), Debt largely skips the nineteenth century in its ambitious account of the cultural origins of the modern era's recurrent debt crises. Comprehensive structural and historical explanation of the condition of the modern world economy is not Graeber's aim, however. Rather, Debt offers an expansive critique of one view of human nature and economic relations that Graeber sees crystallising in the European Enlightenment, and which still exerts a destructive hold on the modern political imagination through the field of classical political economy. 'To tell the history of debt ... is also necessarily to reconstruct how the language of the marketplace has come to pervade every aspect of human life - even to provide the terminology for the moral and religious voices raised against it' (Graeber, p. 89).
This reading, like all possible interpretations of Graeber's impossibly elusive and ambitious work, is somewhat tendentious. For one thing, it requires us to focus overwhelmingly on the first half of the book, which establishes the dimensions of his moral critique, rather than the second, that takes his re-examination of credit, currency and society and allows it to play out through oscillating periods of 'hard' specie money (when war demands that troops are paid in something anonymous) and invisible credit money, when cosmopolitan trade can be managed on secure foundations of institutional and interpersonal trust, and protections for debtors are strengthened (Graeber, pp. 45-50). But, more generally, it's genuinely difficult to work out how any of these deceptively readable, fascinating chapters fit together. This is not so much a linear argument as a network of mutually reinforcing propositions, which intersect unpredictably at various stages of Graeber's hazy, colloquial exposition. The style could be considered engaging or maddening, according to taste.
Caveats aside, Graeber does seem to make some claims that might enable us to start to pin him down. For while he engages in an extensive exploration of the evolution of debt, debt collection, and the debt-laden language of religious 'redemption' during the 'Axial Age' of ancient empires and world religions, his most proximate modern target is an idea that he detects in Adam Smith. The Scottish 'founder' of political economy ostensibly argued 'that there was something called "the economy", which operated by its own rules, separate from moral or political life, that economists could take as their field of study' (Graeber, pp. 27-8). The Wealth of Nations, according to Graeber, was a 'utopian' project, which set out to ignore the violent, political foundations of modern commerce and ascribe normative value to a society of self-interested exchange.
This is a disappointingly dated picture of Smith, and one which even a quick perusal of the third book of the Wealth of Nations - which specifically differentiates between a 'natural progress of opulence' based on an imaginary model exchange society and the 'unnatural and retrograde order' of really existing European history - will swiftly dispatch (Smith, 1976; for something more than a perusal: Hont, 2005). But if Graeber's is a mis-reading, it is also a very common and influential one; not least for the very practitioners of modern neo-classical economics that Debt also aggressively critiques (Graeber, pp. 22-8). Intellectual history can fascinate with its insights when it reminds us that our received visions of important figures and ideas are probably inaccurate, but it can also bore with its naivety when it is too precious about the misappropriation of treasured past masters. The interest in reading two recent works on the intellectual history of eighteenth century political economy in parallel with Graeber's Debt lies not, therefore, in picking historical holes in his use of particular long-dead authors. Rather, we might aim to use Sonenscher and Nakhimovksy to evaluate the novelty, and possible implications, of Graeber's critique of the powerful modern vision of a world of commercial nation states bequeathed to us by the European Enlightenment. First, however, it's necessary to dig a little deeper into Graeber's rather familiar critique of commercial societies and their attendant moral codes.
From Graeber to Rousseau
Graeber's...
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